


Future Imperfect

by Chibihaku



Series: Kalasin Lavellan [8]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, I despise tagging my own work, introspective fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 10:19:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6607156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chibihaku/pseuds/Chibihaku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day, you’ll meet a different cat, wet from the rain of a coastal storm and she’ll save your life twice in the time it takes you to save hers once. She’ll have red hair, not black, and a crooked nose, and she’ll hate the cold and wet with a passion that’ll make you laugh, especially as you’ll meet her in Ferelden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Future Imperfect

**Author's Note:**

> I am not entirely sure what this is. I started writing it months ago, forgot about it, then found it again tonight while looking for a different draft, so I finished it off.

Look, there you are.

Do you see? Just over in that corner, there. Taller than the others your age and broad-shouldered. Too strong for your own good and not quite used to your body yet. You stumble sometimes over your feet, throw things a little too far, hit things a little too hard. You’ve got a mop of unruly black hair on your head that sticks up every-which-way.

You’re sulking at the moment. You won’t be for long because you could never hold a bad mood, but at this moment you’re upset because you were told not to try to help clear the things from the morning meal, and you did it anyway. Broke three plates when you stumbled and they went out of your hands. Got a porcelain shard stuck in your knee. It’ll be your first scar when it heals, though when you’re an adult you’ll lie and say it was a glancing sword wound and not a result of a child’s carelessness. Tama fixed it, Tama scolded you and Tama sent you outside to think about how to better your body awareness for next time.

Tama turns everything into a lesson.

Years from now, your body will be littered with scars and every one will have a lesson attached, just like this one. Swing harder, move faster, be aware of your body at all times. You will grow to be very skilled and very wise. You will not make the same mistakes twice.

There you go – a cat, sitting on a fence. A black and white thing that meows at you once and flicks its tail against the sun-baked stone of the wall it’s sitting on. It drops down off the ledge, you stay still. It wends around your legs, butts your knee with its head and saunters away, tail high, steps containing that confident, feline bounce that mark it as a half-wild creature.

Your face breaks into a smile and your mood is gone.

You never could stay angry for long.

\---

One day, you’ll meet a different cat, wet from the rain of a coastal storm and she’ll save your life twice in the time it takes you to save hers once. She’ll have red hair, not black, and a crooked nose, and she’ll hate the cold and wet with a passion that’ll make you laugh, especially as you’ll meet her in Ferelden.

They’ll call her the herald of a religion she doesn’t believe in and she’ll be too polite to argue for long. But you’ll watch her later as she dances a clever two-step, never actually _agreeing_ with the people around her, but still doing a damn good enough job that they don’t hold that against her for too long either.

She’ll walk with a wild-cat swagger when she thinks no-one is looking, and she’ll flick her charm like a tail against a sun-baked sill and smile with her eyes at strangers. She’ll purr deep when it suits her, polite but always distant, distant, distant until something calls for closeness.

She’ll make you smile too.

\---

You will be very strong, one day, and very, very clever, though you’ll hide the cleverness underneath the strength as often as you can.

Tama will see the potential in you one night over dinner when you finally try the plan you’ve been sitting on for weeks – you’ll have worked out all the kinks, you’ll have gotten the meat in your pocket with a quick trick of your hand and Tama will have said those words to you so often that you’ll be nearly sure she’ll say them to you again. You’re going to show her that you’re more than just brawn and though she already knows that; she will think it’s a suitable cleverness for a soldier right up until the moment when you will pull the meat out of your pocket, place it on your plate and eat it all up in three quick bites. Three more things off your plate, she’s going to say, and she’s going to frown slightly at you when you bend her rules so perfectly.

You’ll just laugh, delighted, that it worked, that you got away with it, that the plan you’ve been working on has come to perfect fruition. Then you’ll run, not willing to test your luck more than you have. You’ll run to the others and you won’t look back as your life starts changing.

You’ll be surprised when Tama tells you later that you’re destined for training of a different sort – you’ll have thought up until that moment that all Sten thought the same way you did, looking for the best way to follow orders but get what you want at the same time. Tama will laugh and run a hand through your hair (and you won’t bat her away, even though you’ll be getting too big for that sort of affection by the time it happens) and she’ll tell you that you’ll be destined for a new title now.

Hissrad.

You’ll try it on your tongue, twice, testing the way it tastes.

Hissrad.

You won’t be able to decide if you like it.

\---

Do you know at all, what your life will be like?

There you are, by that wall, toeing a small rut into the dirt by your feet and starting (just starting, mind you) to get a little hungry. Do you realise, as young as you are, that an act as simple as putting more meat on your plate will change the direction of your life so thoroughly?

If you don’t put the meat on your plate you’ll grow up a soldier in Seheron, following orders as best you’re able and chafing when you see the better way, the _cleverer_ way to do something. You’ll choke on the taste of orders from above – men who have always been soldiers and who will always be soldiers.

You might have broken earlier if you hadn’t put the meat on your plate. You might have broken years later, too old and forever stuck as a Sten because of your inability to stick to the spirit of an order.

You would have stayed under the qun, but then a young man in a bar might have died. An elf in an alienage would have been hanged for killing a lord’s son. A forgotten noble would have drank himself to death and never said a word to anyone, not a one, though to be fair he won’t say that many words to you, either.

Will Tama see your future in a plate with vegetables on it? Will she see a destiny with a struggling soldier with a big heart and a clever mind, who will try his best to keep those around him happy even as he fights against himself nearly daily to follow the orders he’s been given and not the ones he can interpret out of them?

Your life will have been so different.

But in some ways it would have been the same.

\---

There’ll be a bar, at some point.

There will be a lot of bars, actually, but there will be one in particular where fates will twist together. You’ll be halfway through your second pint and considering a third, still uncertain of what the point to anything is. You’ll be on your way to Orlais, and you’ll be muttering and grumbling about fancy humans who don’t know anything about nothing, but you’ll be following the orders you’re given.

You’ll be close to the border of Tevinter when it happens, you’ll see some soldiers who should know better picking on some kid fresh out of the military. You won’t know why you do it, but you’ll bellow. You’ll throw yourself in the way of a flail and you’ll suddenly not be able to see through one eye.

The good news is that it won’t hurt you straight away. You’ll be able to fight them all off, one by one, you’ll only have to kill two (the rest will run when they realise they’re going to lose) and it won’t be until you turn around and see the looks of horror on the face of the kid you saved and the barkeep that you’ll realise your face is ruined.

The bad news is when the pain finally does come, it’s going to keep you out of commission for two days. The kid’ll stay with you and look after you through it, when he could have just left. He’ll say something gruff about debts owed, but really he’s just doing it because he’s almost as kind as you are.

\---

You’re not proud of your looks, are you?

Both your knees are scabbed up, and there’s bruises littering the rest of you. Relics from old fights and times where you’ve stepped in to protect the underdog. You’ll meet a man, one day, and you’ll see in him that he’s _trying_ to be a good man and not quite getting there. He’ll be lying, not just to himself but to everyone else, but you’ll forgive him for it and decide to keep his secret because at this stage, you’ll still think you’re lying about who you are, too. You’ll give him a tip or two, tell him to stop caring so much about what makes a man and start focusing on what makes a _good person_ and maybe your words will get through, or maybe it’ll be a veiled threat from a spymaster you’ll know, or maybe it’ll just be that the man finally sees the place in the world where he fits because something sinks in and he does eventually become a good man in more than just name.

But you?

You couldn’t be a bad person if you tried. Your heart’s too big, your soul too willing to give.

That will cause you more pain than anything else.

It will be the thing that drives you to stand on a beach, split with indecision between what you will have thought was right and what you’ll be beginning to suspect is actually the truth of it. You’ll have an old life standing on one side and a new life waiting on your order down below, and you’ll feel a hand brush along one of the scars on your arms in a touch as gentle as the wings of a baby bird.

She’ll ask you to do what your heart thinks is right, and not what your head tells you that you should.

It will hurt.

No matter what you do, no matter if you choose head or heart, this moment will hurt.

\---

You don’t know it now but people will decide as you grow that you are a very certain kind of attractive. They will use words like _primal_ , _beastial_ , _carnal_ , and will want to do things to you that you aren’t aware even exist at your young age.

You’ll want to do the same with them, though, and you’ll enjoy yourself as you do it.

They’ll all miss something in you, though, and as Tama calls you in from watching the ants crawl along the rocks, you get your very first taste of this from one of the other young imekari that are growing up with you. She’s small, for a qunari, with a round figure and hair braided into two neat rows over her head. She smiles shyly at you, and turns a faint shade of pink when you grin back, your smile gap-toothed and crooked and, at the moment, free from any scars.

You remember that she’s going to be a baker – she has warm hands and an artistic streak, though she likes sweet things a little too much. She sneaks you sugar for your tea from a small bag she takes great pains to refill, sometimes getting in trouble when she gets caught in the kitchen stores. At the moment, she looks soft and warm in a plain linen dress and when you duck past her, hand brushing against her accidentally, she yelps and turns bright crimson.

The part of you that Tama knows wonders if you can use that, the rest of you is puzzled in the way of a child – confused for a moment then deciding that it doesn’t matter, running past her into the hall beyond, stomach growling with a vivacious boy’s intensity.

You don’t notice her watching you. You don’t hear the wistful sigh of a girl’s first crush – the crush of the still far-too-young, the crush of a person who thinks that kisses and ribbons and frills are the only things that mark true love.

\---

The things that mark love for you will be wholly different from what the young baker knew. There’ll be a rampart, high and cold. There’ll be knives involved (but not in the fun way) and there’ll be two dead agents and pain and fear choking up your lungs.

You’ll have lost everything you thought you knew, but there’ll be a moment where you’ll fall, fall, fall, without even realising that you’ve slipped.

There’ll be a cat, standing in front of you – wild and gentle and sweet. She’ll be mad at you for a moment, then merely mad _for_ you, bristling with her hair on end and demanding that you accept that you’re a good man.

She’ll see you, primal, beastial, carnal – but don’t you know? Cats have no use for those things.

It’s the cleverness that she’ll fall for.

It’s the kindness that will bring her back to bask in you, as if you were a sunbeam.

It’s your gentle hands on her that’ll tame her wildness, though she won’t lose the swagger and will be her own creature still, like any good cat would.

Oh, you’ll own her completely, but she’ll claim your heart in the manner of a cat, deciding that it’s hers without any real thought towards the fact it could be anything else. And you’ll give it to her gladly if only because she’ll give you her heart in return.

Cats only love those who are good, and kind, and strong.

\---

So there you are, sitting with your legs swinging on a bench that you’ve nearly grown into.

The vegetables are on the table and the meat’s nearly all gone. The larger imekari are sitting alongside you on one side, and the smaller are on the smaller benches down the hall.

The tamassrans wander, keeping the peace, every so often one will stoop and scold you and tell you to eat your vegetables, even as you leave them to grow cold on your plate.

The meat has spices and juices and the vegetables are plain, and you decide to try the plan you’ve been thinking of for weeks.

You take three pieces of meat and hide them in your pocket, even as the other imekari are slowly let out of the hall to go wash up and play.

A tamassran approaches you, exasperation on her features, as she tells you to eat three more things off your plate.

What will you do, little imekari?

What will you do?


End file.
